12 minute read
OPINION
The city is approving mostly luxury condo/ apartment buildings, costing more than 50% of average SLC incomes, and their “solution” for those of us who aren’t wealthy is to tear down existing housing (sometimes affordable, sometimes not) to build overpriced dorm-style housing that still costs more than most can afford.
An income that used to get you your own place, with money left over for other expenditures, now gets you your own room and shared kitchen/bathroom space with strangers. And it still doesn’t leave you enough money to save for the future.
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The city can help by only approving permits for one luxury unit for every 10-20 affordable units that are built. Or at the very least, stop incentivizing luxury builds by not driving away public property for luxury housing (like the Pantages Theater disaster) and by jacking up taxes and fees on more expensive housing, empty units used as investments and Airbnb units, which also contribute to rising housing costs.
JENNIFERKSLC Via Instagram
“Julian Assange,” June 30 Soap Box and June 22 Taking a Gander
To comment on Michael Robinson’s recent column and that of Amy Fink’s letter in response, I would start by noting that there’s a difference between WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg.
That difference being that Ellsberg stole the data/information he released and did not hide from that fact. He paid the price. The New York Times published the info and President Richard Nixon brought them to court and the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Times had the right to publish because they did not steal the info.
But Assange—according to the charges made against him—worked directly with Chelsea Manning, a U.S. Army active-duty soldier, and through his own experience with the NSA, to steal classified material. At least Manning also was convicted and served time.
How a whistleblower tries to get his boss(es) to correct something that’s classified is one question. It’s another question when the government is clearly doing something against the law or blatantly trying to cover up wrongdoing.
JOHN THOMPSON Ogden
Cosmic Revelations
I am shocked! I got up really close to my TV, cleaned my glasses and squinted, but I couldn’t see the Celestial Kingdom on the new NASA photos from deep in space. Also couldn’t find any Mormon babies floating around up there waiting to be born. Sadly, I also couldn’t see any of my beloved deceased friends or relatives. Could I have been duped all these years?
TED OTTINGER Taylorsville Supreme Court Justices Kavanaugh and Thomas, For the human female gender a nemesis. Confirmation hearings of sexual misconduct, Which Republican male Senators did obstruct.
Anita Hill and Christine Ford both professors, Courageous confronters of these stud oppressors. “Long Dong Silver” and inebriation, Chauvinistic detriments to their captivation.
Blind Justice inclusive and the Law of the Land, Except when politics and religion countermand. When political “incorrectness” on gender and race, Void the Compassion and Love of Eternal Grace.
Powerful male antagonists to female choice, Overturn Roe v. Wade to silence women’s voice.
GEORGE KIBILDIS Sparta, New Jersey
Correction: The article “Street Fight,” in City Weekly’s July 7 issue, incorrectly identified the advocacy group Wasatch Tenants United.
THE BOX
What book are you reading now and what’s next on your list? Benjamin Wood
I’m reading Dune for the first time and loving it—to the point that I’ll probably read Dune Messiah next.
Chelsea Neider
The Shining, and It will be next.
Katharine Biele
I just finished, finally, The Night Fire by Michael Connelly, and am trying to finish The Seed Keeper by Diane Wilson. COVID and our dystopian world have made concentrating on novels difficult. I’m best at focusing on New Yorker cartoons.
Eric Granato
Currently reading American Gods, then hopefully Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72.
Scott Renshaw
Technically speaking, the last book I opened to read was The Unofficial Disney Parks Cookbook. And it will probably be the next one, too. More seriously, just finished The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich, moving on to Patricia Lockwood’s memoir Priestdaddy.
Go Big or Go Extinct
Various animal species—particularly wide-ranging carnivores such as cougars and wolverines—are facing localized extinctions due to our patterns of land protection. If we are to reverse these trends, we must do a much better job of protecting massive expanses of connected areas on the lands administered by government agencies, as well as those owned by private individuals.
But many such areas cross state and even national boundaries. And the ongoing battle about the future of Utah’s Bears Ears National Monument offers an inkling of the enormity of the task that lies ahead.
Fortunately, Bears Ears is soon likely to become more intact. On May 17, Utah’s Legislative Management Committee approved a land swap with the federal government. Utah’s School and Institutional Trust Lands Administration (SITLA) is poised to give up 161,000 acres that it owns inside the monument and in return, the federal government will give SITLA 164,000 acres of public land scattered throughout the state. This is actually a comparatively small amount of land—the monument encompasses roughly 1.36 million acres.
Once this exchange is approved, Utah will be able to develop the obtained areas for the extraction of such minerals as potash and lithium, as well as oil and gas. SITLA’s director, Michelle McConkie, recently told the Deseret News that such activity could generate hundreds of millions of dollars for the state’s education budget. And due to land-use restrictions within Bears Ears, the property that Utah will be trading has generated less than $100,000 each year.
It is heartening to see dialogue between the federal and state governments on a highly contentious matter—the creation of Bears Ears National Monument in 2016 by President Obama. This was strongly supported by Native American tribes due to the area’s spiritual, historical and cultural significance. But just two years later, President Trump severely reduced its size, deferring to the wishes of many of Utah’s politicians. Then, last year, President Biden essentially restored the monument’s original boundaries.
This story continues to unfold. Environmental and tribal organizations had been pursuing litigation over the monument’s shrinking, and those actions are now in limbo following its restoration. But Sean Reyes, Utah’s Attorney General, is threatening new lawsuits over the restitution of the monument’s boundaries.
Even if this seemingly immense area remains protected, it could still be insufficient for the long-term conservation of certain animal species. The protection of wildlife habitat is a critical component of our nation’s conservation efforts. However, this principle was not systematically considered in designating either Bears Ears or the neighboring Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, beyond the obvious notion that more habitat is beneficial to wildlife.
The creation of protected areas is often done in a piecemeal fashion, without understanding how an area benefits certain species. And the connectivity of such places is rarely a guiding factor in determining their boundaries.
As research from William Newmark—of the Utah Museum of Natural History—has found, there is generally a lack of correspondence between the legal boundaries of our continent’s Western national parks and their inhabitant species’ “biotic” boundaries (i.e., the area needed to sustain them). Thus, despite the existence of numerous big parks, many large, wide-ranging mammalian carnivores could be headed for extinction.
I’ve examined the potential impact of designating wilderness and other natural areas in Utah on mammalian conservation, focusing on the Utah Wilderness Coalition’s proposal for classifying over 8 million acres of federal land as wilderness. “Wilderness” is the strongest type of land protection in the United States—it may occur in already established national parks, monuments and forests.
The coalition’s proposal—America’s Red Rock Wilderness Act—encompasses many parcels, including the 1.36-millionacre (roughly 5,500 square kilometers) Bears Ears National Monument and the 1.87-million-acre (7,600 square km) Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. Virtually all of it is administered by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management.
To determine the size of a population needed to sustain itself for a given amount of time, conservation biologists use a procedure called Minimum Population Viability Analysis. Factors such as a species’ habitat requirements, genetic variation and reproductive biology help to determine such values. Newmark estimated that the cougar population in Grand Canyon National Park (an area near southern Utah for which such data exists) requires about 8,000 square kilometers for there to be a high probability of sustaining 50 cougars for 100 years. Approximately 80,000 square kilometers are needed to support 500 cougars for 1,000 years.
That may seem like a lot of cougars and a very long time, but 1,000 years is but a blink of the eye in evolutionary time. It is, indeed, a reasonable population size if the goal is to maintain these animals in this region for the foreseeable future. It should provide them with the chance to adapt to the inevitable and long-term changes that will continue to occur in their environment.
The aforementioned proposal to designate 8 million acres as protected wilderness equates to more than 32,000 square kilometers. Southern Utah’s other large, protected areas— its five national parks and Glen Canyon National Recreation Area (in Utah and Arizona)—encompass an additional 9,600 square kilometers. This total amount of land thus appears to be rather insufficient to sustain a robust cougar population for 1,000 years.
Only a few conservation organizations are addressing these large-scale issues, such as Wildlands Network and the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative. And as the seemingly endless debates about Utah’s national monuments and other federal lands continue, those concerned about wildlife conservation should be contemplating a grander, longer-term vision. CW
Private Eye is off this week. Dr. Sam Zeveloff is a Presidential Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Zoology at Weber State University. Send feedback to comments@cityweekly.net
Grow your own.
8 | JULY 14, 2022 Your favorite garden center since 1955 3500 South 900 East | 801.487.4131 www.millcreekgardens.com
HIT: Up in the Air
The proposed Little Cottonwood Canyon gondola has its own website. How cool is that? Except, taxpayers may have to fork out $500 million for its traffic solutions that benefit a couple of resorts and some entitled skiers. The 8-mile gondola could cost a lot— maybe $1 billion. Whether it’s worth freeing the gridlock is still a question. Widening the road and enhancing the bus system could be a mere $510 million. What a deal! OK, no one likes lines of cars clogging the narrow road to our ski resorts, but who does this upgrade really help? It’s not everybody. It’s Alta, Snowbird and—for the sake of saving face—UDOT. Salt Lake County Mayor Jenny Wilson, in a Salt Lake Tribune article, called BS: “Don’t you think the canyon deserves a little more time for us to get it right?” Activists are making noise. Maybe it will be heard.
MISS: A Man’s World
Let’s talk about women again. You know, our state just loves women, the helpmates who bring us all those little souls and raise them amid much baking of bread. We do not trust them with their own bodies—and so, abortion be gone. Never mind that those women must do the bidding of their husbands, or at least some man. Just know that they will not rise to statewide political heights. Yeah, it’s been a long time since Jan Graham was elected attorney general, or Olene Walker became a default governor, much to the consternation of the Republican elite. Walker lost her re-election primary and didn’t get that chance again. Now, women are gnashing their teeth that the two female GOP candidates taking on Sen. Mike Lee failed to push him out. Former state Sen. Pat Jones, on KSL Radio, blamed sexism. Whatever you call it, the patriarchy wins.
MISS: Drip, Drip, Drip
No, the Great Salt Lake hasn’t magically grown feet of water. It’s at an alltime low, and maybe we could blame the Bangerter lake pumps—if they had actually pumped anything before the water began to disappear. Fox 13’s Ben Winslow stood out by the drying lake just to show us how bad it is. And then we got the worse news about Utah’s air quality. World Population Review ranked it “the worst air quality on average” even with a moderate AQI range. Sure, the mountains are partly to blame, but there’s so much more to this. In a Deseret News op-ed, outgoing Rep. Steve Handy, R-Layton—the latest victim of far-right-wing politics— touted ideas like electric buses and cars. But it’s going to take a politician with the courage to call out fossil fuels to really make a difference.
Save the Dino Tracks
We realize that some people don’t believe in dinosaurs, but those people don’t believe in history, either. Maybe you care about what’s left of the dinosaurs and how we can help preserve those fragile reminders of a past long gone. There has been a public outcry since the Bureau of Land Management brought backhoes in to remove a boardwalk near Moab at the Mill Canyon Dinosaur Tracksite. The weight of the heavy machinery was destroying the footprint fossils, and the BLM stopped work to change course. “The BLM has now marked three alternate access routes and is asking the public for input,” but you need to provide feedback for BLM Seeks Public In-
put on Mill Canyon Dinosaur Tracksite
Walkway Replacement. People raised concerns about concrete being poured on the tracksite to build the new boardwalk. Instead, a raised boardwalk will be built with steel footing and a thin layer of concrete on top. We’re talking about preserving 112-million-year-old Early Cretaceous dinosaur footprints, first reported in 2009. There are more than 200 tracks. Still, there are options to preserve the tracks that the BLM may not have considered. Online
or by mail, by Tuesday, July 26, free. https://on.doi.gov/3Il7VCX
LGBTQ and Religion
Back to the U.S. Supreme Court and its hints at eviscerating gay rights: You may want to know how some religions play into the dialogue. At Queering Our Religion:
Panel on LGBT Theology and Spirituali-
ty in Utah, you’ll hear from clergy of “open and affirming” congregations on what they see as Christ’s message of love and inclusion. You can’t put all religions in the same bucket when it comes to acceptance or rejection of the LGBTQ+ community. Find out more and ask hard questions. First
Methodist Church of Salt Lake City, 203 S. 200 East, Saturday, July 16, 5 p.m., free. https://bit.ly/3OEeFya
Social Justice, Much?
You may not think that the abortion debate has anything to do with race, but think again. Restricting abortion will hurt the most vulnerable in the United States and disproportionately affects women of color. “In light of the most recent Supreme Court decision on abortion and all that is happening two years after the murder of George Floyd” join Let’s Talk … Social Justice in America. You will hear from a panel that includes Mindset Strategies, Global Equity, American University, the NAACP Youth and College Division and an author-pastor, all with perspectives on the new era we face. Virtual, Thursday, July
